Another Rollback of Rights

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority eliminates affirmative action for minorities in private college admissions

The United States Supreme Court has declared race-conscious affirmative action — which ensures greater diversity in the country’s most elite private colleges — unconstitutional. In Thursday’s ruling, supported by a six-justice conservative majority, the court twisted the constitutional arguments justifying the race-based selection of candidates into a form of discrimination, by asserting that the practice itself is discriminatory. The three justices in the progressive minority — a Black woman and a Latina woman among them — issued resounding dissenting opinions.

The ruling resolves two lawsuits against Harvard and North Carolina universities. According to the universities’ application process, once a student meets all the admission criteria, race is taken into account to grant them a spot. Black and Latino communities are most likely to benefit from these types of programs, which have a dual objective. They help correct the chronic social inequality derived from the racial discrimination ingrained in U.S. history. They also benefit universities themselves by introducing more diversity to the student body and faculty and, in the longer term, to the companies and institutions that benefit from them.

This decision echoes the dynamics and context in which the Supreme Court erased abortion rights protections at the federal level. As a result, half of the country’s women today have fewer rights than their mothers did, depending on where they live. Affirmative action has been a central issue for the conservative right over the last half century, and has found in the current composition of the Supreme Court a group of justices who are willing to reverse the court’s own precedent to erase social progress at the cost of undermining the institution’s moral authority. “This is not a normal court,” President Joe Biden said. No, it is not. And it is worth remembering that this conservative majority is a product of Republican chicanery that is incongruent with what Americans have voted for in the last two decades.

Affirmative action is rooted in the heinous history of oppression against Black people that has shaped the United States since it was founded. The ruling intends to erase that history and assert that, after the end of slavery and segregation laws, racism no longer exists. This negates the reality of an “endemically segregated” country, as expressed by Justice Sonia Sotomayor — who is of Hispanic descent — in her dissenting opinion.

Progress in matters of equality in our society may give us a false sense of inevitability. Laws correct and prevent injustice, and every law is reversible through the same democratic process that made it possible. We must interpret the existing reactionary current in the U.S. Supreme Court as a warning that there is a path leading back to the past, that the path begins at the ballot box, and that when somebody vows to eliminate certain rights and is given the power to do so, they generally do.